Embarking on another Nebula voyage

I see I won’t be lacking for stories to read. The Nebula ballot is out and it looks like a long list. Of the novels, I’ve read Brasyl, which felt long enough for at least two novels. I remember thinking that it seemed more like a Nebula novel than a Hugo novel. As for the […]

Re: Bender’s Game

As I mentioned a while ago, Futurama is practically the only sci-fi on TV that I can stand. That is, I like it enough to keep watching the reruns and to enjoy watching the latest Futurama release, Bender’s Game, which makes two hours feel like 20 minutes.

Re: Reparations

If you’re looking for a moving story about sacrifice that’s not related to the holidays, you might appreciate “Reparations” by Merrie Haskell, in an excellent reading on Escape Pod. Like “Wikihistory” it involves time travel to Worrld War II, but it’s the polar opposite in tone.

Re: Private Detective Molly

On the surface, “Private Detective Molly,” by A.B. Goelman seems to your basic SF detective story, with a contrived bad guy who wants to cheat sweet little Dorothy. And the only wise-cracking detective standing in the way is a six-inch doll, who says: I’m a sucker for a crying girl. You can call it programming […]

Re: Anathem

If you read cosmology books for fun, you’ll have plenty of fun reading Anathem, by Neil Stephenson. It also helps if you like wordplay, language, and philosophy. I liked this book so much I was actually a bit relieved that I didn’t fall in love with it, because a 900 page book could mean some […]

Incandescence

I’m not sure it’s right for me to write about Incandescence, by Greg Egan. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t even make it past the 150 page mark. In fact I lost count of how many essays it took me to read the first four chapters. But I put it on my 2008 list of […]

Re: First Tuesday

Prompted by some of the electoral SF we mentioned, I reread “First Tuesday,” by Robert Reed. I remembered it wrong. It’s not about an election, it’s about the first national press conference.

Re: Sly Mongoose

I’ve been having a terrible run of luck with fiction the last week, none of them worth talking about, though I was tempted to take a picture of the stack of books I could barely start that went back to the library. To some degree, I managed to break that streak with some kickass Azteca-Caribbean […]

Re: Craphound

“I, Row-Boat” was so enjoyable, it reminded me to look for more from Cory Doctorow, and I went all the way back to his first professional sale, “Craphound.” This story is available in a variety of formats, from hard-copy to podcast, and they all start the same: Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, […]

Re: I, Row-Boat

In “I, Row-Boat,” by Cory Doctorow, Robbie is a sentient rowboat who ferries human-shells out to the reefs to go diving. One day, that day gets ruined when someone out in the noösphere decides to give the reef sentience. The reef hates it so much, it wants to Kill All Humans. Robbie, however, is an […]